World

In Search for Flight M370, New Seafloor Map Is 'Better Than Nothing'

In this photo taken from the Royal New Zealand Air force (RNZAF) P-3K2-Orion aircraft, a spotter looks out of a window in search of debris from the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, in the Indian Ocean off the coast of western Australia on Sunday, April 13, 2014.

Using advanced satellite techniques, scientists released a new map on Tuesday of the underwater terrain within part of the search area for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which was lost on March 8 during a flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing, China. The search is taking place across a large area of the Indian Ocean to the west of Australia, and it has been hampered by a lack of data about the undersea terrain in the area.

Writing in the journal EOS, two seafloor mapping experts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) produced a new illustration of the seafloor area where the acoustic signals from the airplane's black boxes were heard by surface ships in late March and early April.

The new map does not encompass the entire official search area, but does include a sizable section of it, measuring 1,243 miles long by 870 miles wide. The map was generated using satellite radar techniques, which infer information about the ocean floor by measuring subtle distortions to sea level and the Earth's gravity. Walter H.F. Smith, a geophysicist at NOAA and one of the authors of the new map, told Mashable that satellite radar is not as accurate as measurements taken using ship-borne sonar.

Seafloor topography in the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 search area. Dashed lines approximate the search zone for sonar pings emitted by the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder. The deepest point in the area (D) lies in the Wallaby-Zenith Fracture Zone at an estimated depth of 7883 meters. The Wallaby Plateau (W) lies to the east of the Zenith Plateau. The shallowest point in the entire area shown here is on Broken Ridge (BR). The inset in the top left shows the area’s location to the west of Australia.

Image: EOS: Walter H.F. Smith and Karen M. Marks

The current lack of reliable seafloor measurements makes the new map potentially useful to the search crews, Smith says, while cautioning that it's not definite it would greatly benefit the search.

"It's a very, very indirect way to infer what the bottom looks like, but it's better than nothing which is what we have now," Smith said. Just 5% of the ocean bottom in the southeast Indian Ocean has been mapped in detail by ships, he said.

According to Smith, satellite radar can detect a mountain if it's as large as a mile high and a few miles across, whereas a modern sonar system onboard a ship could survey patches of the seafloor on the scale of just a few acres.

The new map revealed two plateaus near where the black box "pings" were heard by Chinese and Australian vessels in early April, as well as valleys measuring more than five miles deep.

The shape of the seafloor is a critical factor in determining ocean currents, which could affect the path that debris took and where it might be found. In addition, the terrain makes a difference for search crews that need to decide which remotely operated underwater vehicles to use for finding the black boxes and airplane wreckage.

According to Bloomberg News, a Chinese vessel is going to undertake a sonar-based underwater survey to try to give search crews a better idea of the terrain they are dealing with.

The long search for the lost jetliner has demonstrated to the world how little scientists actually know about the planet's oceans. Researchers have been arguing for years that funding be provided for seafloor mapping and exploration projects, but to no avail. Smith says that there are probably about 100,000 underwater mountains (also known as seamounts) out there that have yet to be discovered, and improved maps could greatly affect everything from tsunami forecasts to climate change projections.

A Navy study found that it would take about $3 billion and 200 years of ship time to totally map the unmapped portions of the deep oceans. Smith says that means a fleet of 40 ships would take just five years to do the job. "It sounds expensive but it's not really expensive in the grand scheme of what else we're doing," he said.

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